Author
Topic: Bad-Actor ISP Shutdown by FTC (Read 2347 times)

Remember last autumn, when the McColo takedown made the spam go away and brought sweet, sweet (relative) peace to all our inboxes for a while? It's not likely that the closure of Pricewest will have that sort of direct effect on most of our lives, but a district court judge's ruling to have the plug pulled on the ISP will certainly improve the Internet in other ways.

The ruling was made at the request of the FTC, which has a long history of history with Pricewest. The ISP is believed to have engaged in a variety of offenses -- botnets, yes, but also malware distribution, fake pharma sites, investment scams, and some of the very worst kinds of pornography. (Yeah, they had that. Yeah, they had that too.) Takedown requests made to the ISP -- operating under a variety of names, including 3FN, Triple Fiber Network, APX Telecom, APS Telecom, and APS Communication -- have been either ignored or dodged by shifting the content to another bank of IP addresses under Pricewert's control.

The takedown is just one step in the process of getting rid of an alleged bad actor. For now, the ISP is offline and its business assets have been frozen. Guilt or innocence will be decided in a court of law, and of course the ISP's upstream provider and data centers will have some thoughts on whether they want to do business with this outfit again.